Social Promotion - Statistics

Statistics

For boys and minorities, retention is even more common. Nationally, by the time students reach high school, the retention rate for boys is about ten percentage points higher than for girls. In the early grades, retention rates are similar among white Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. By high school, the rate is about 15 percentage points higher for African Americans and Hispanics than for whites.

In 1999, educational researcher Robert Hauser said of the New York City school district: "In its plan to end social promotion the administration appears to have ... an enforcement provision—flunking kids by the carload lot—about which the great mass of evidence is strongly negative. And this policy will hurt poor and minority children most of all."

In a study of 99,000 Florida students, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters found that "retained students slightly outperformed socially promoted students in reading in the first year after retention, and these gains increased substantially in the second year. Results were robust across two distinct IV comparisons: an across-year approach comparing students who were essentially separated by the year in which they happened to have been born, and a regression discontinuity design."